D compiler as part of GCC

[Leandro Lucarella]

Jerry Quinn, el 17 de enero a las 21:43 me escribiste:
> Hi, folks,
> 
> I'm interested in creating a D front end for GCC that would be part of
> the GCC codebase.  My feeling is that a GDC that is part of GCC
> distributions will likely have more life than one that must be updated
> whenever a new GCC release comes out.  As with linux kernel in-tree
> drivers being kept up to date, an integrated GDC would tend to move
> forward as well.

I think that if a D compiler is included with the official GCC
distribution, it would be a massive step forward for the language. It
would make it's adoption much easier since people tend to trust a lot in
GCC.

> My personal desire is to implement (and track) the 2.0 language since
> I would like to see that feature set available through GCC.  Second, by
> the time a working front end becomes part of GCC, the 2.0 language will
> likely be complete.

If you are really going to do this, I strongly suggest that you make the
new front-end as back-end independent as possible, so it can be used by
other back-ends like LLVM. People is not very happy in general with DMD
front-end, so having a new front-end that's not tied to DMD's back-end
could be a huge win for other projects too. That could encourage third
party tools too, like code analyzers, or even make it suitable for
embedding in IDEs, etc. I think it would be best to even make the
front-end project a separated from the whole compiler.

> One question I have (of many) is whether a different name should be
> used.  If this is called GDC there will be some confusion with the
> current GDC.  What thoughts do you all have?

I think too that if this compiler is intended to replace the current GDC
(I'm not convinced that's a good idea, maybe it would be nice to have both
front-end options), taking over the name is OK, otherwise a new name would
be necessary.

> In general is there interest in this project, especially contributing to
> it?

I'm *very* interested, not so sure I could contribute a lot though :(

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GPG Key: 5F5A8D05 (F8CD F9A7 BF00 5431 4145  104C 949E BFB6 5F5A 8D05)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Agitamos toda la zona de la paleta al horno, vemos que una luz nos
atraviesa toda la zona intestinal...
	-- Sidharta Kiwi